Tiger-dog-reptile-alien

I love this “dog,” if indeed that’s what it is… I love the idea of this creature, a barely mammalian, tiger-striped, sighthound-shaped hybrid that is as wild as its coat pattern and alien face. However, I need to do a little more research to figure out if this illustration was supposed to document a real canid that existed around the time of its artist, TAKAGI Shunzan 高木春山 (b. ? ~ d. 1852), or if was a record of his imagination.

The drawing originally came from a 195 volume encyclopedia of flora and fauna, the Honzō zusetsu 本草図説. I scanned this particular illustration from The Graphics of Japanese Dog [Nihon no inu 日本の犬], ed. TAKAOKA Kazuya 高岡一弥 with photographs by KURU Sachiko 久留幸子 (Tokyo: Pie Books, 2005).

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9 thoughts on “Tiger-dog-reptile-alien”

There might be a historical truth to it: you might want to look up sighthounds in China. I think Stephen Bodio documented extensively about tazis in China. The brindle pattern reminds me of the Kai Ken boar dogs they have in Japan.

So I am not sure if this is a dog that is Chinese-influenced, or it’s a deception of a breed within the Nihon Ken clade.

The coloring and patterning would be all wrong for a Kai Ken. And I’m not sure if the kari inu is a “breed” or even a species as we think of them now, but a more fluid category of semi-domesticated dog… still, a possibility. Again, it’s not clear to me if this is supposed to be dog, wolf, or what, just that the illustration is reprinted in a book that is ostensibly about Japanese dogs.

It seems that Takagi Shunzan meant to compile the Honzō zusetsu as a compendium of native plants and animals, but he could very well have drawn up some entries based on hearsay and supplied information. Given the nature of his project, I would be surprised if this creature was not labeled. The reproduction in the art book I mentioned above does not offer any hints in ID’ing this dog, just that there’s a full collection of the original books housed at the Iwase Bunko Library in Nishio, Japan.

I am not suggesting this dog is the Kai, however the brindle is not unknown to the Nihon ken landrace. So it seems like the “tiger stripe” is the artist’s attempt to describe the brindle pattern. The face is also a dead give-away for that. So there is a genetic basis for it.

The shallow stop isn’t that unknown as well. The Honshu Wolf had them. The dogs of Jomon culture has them; in fact, people tried to recreate the shallow stop for the so-called “Jomon Shiba” by using samples from the Shiba Inu gene pool. So there is potential there as well.

However for the sighthound-like conformation? Unfortunately, strains of dogs can easily go extinct and be recreated with the tides of time. However von Siebold did draw pictures of some really leggy-looking dogs before in his own documents about Japanese faunas, Takagi isn’t that far off– only with the addition the brindle patterns, and more white to the body.

The Ryukyu inu is clearly brindled, too. As are many Formosan Mountain Dogs / “Taiwan dogs,” shown briefly in the link you provided above. “Tiger striped” is the literal translation for brindle, as far as I know — that is, there isn’t a specific term that just means brindled.

I want to guess that someone described this dog to Takagi, and that he may not have seen such a dog with his own eyes, but he was drawing something that he thought truly existed. This is just a guess though, based on similar practices in Chinese illustrated encyclopedias of the natural world. The veracity of such a creature is not considered an issue; rather, what is it about the animal that they’re trying to capture? What place does it have in the overall taxonomy of living things, specific to a Japanese/Chinese/local understanding of how things should be classified?

I don’t have the answers there. =) Again, I would want to track it down to its original context to see.

That’s the unfortunate thing about history. We only see what people recorded, and their reactions to such thoughts. We do not actually see the actual reality of the situation. For all we know, Takagi could be interpreting a thylacine-like creature regaled by Dutch sailors about their adventures during their stays in the East Indies, or was passing on a generational tall tale passed onto them by Indonesians. Maybe Takagi was really bad at drawing, since dogs are not exactly the easiest to draw– this is glaringly obvious when one looks at woodcuts from Medieval Europe; most of the dogs drawn during that time period don’t even look remotely like dogs!acine-like creature regaled by Dutch sailors about their adventures during their stays in the East Indies, or was passing on a generational tall tale passed onto them by Indonesians. Maybe Takagi was really bad at drawing, since dogs are not exactly the easiest to draw– this is glaringly obvious when one looks at woodcuts from Medieval Europe; most of the dogs drawn during that time period don’t even look remotely like dogs! Maybe… there was a cryptic native predatory animal driven to extinction before European zoologists catalogued everything.